Sure, control what you can control, and do your best to contain what you can’t control. You can’t always stamp out a fire; sometimes you just have to deny it fuel. Sometimes that means banning and deleting, sometimes it’s just silence.

Your response argument has been that the right answer is to rise above attacks because responding empowers the attacker.

You said you weren’t the lone voice and that many other people agreed with you, but that was all about how terrible Twitter and other social media are, which most people (including me) agree on. It’s true to say that, by quitting or speaking out against social media, they’ve protested in some broad sense, but a broad…

That’s exactly the kind of public figure that I think is interesting in this issue, because she and other journalists and thinkers have to struggle to find a place to have well-moderated discussions. Yet, NYT is in no sense a well-moderated environment, where the comments on articles are worse than Kinja and the paper…

All the interesting refs went to the same place that all of the interesting playoff matchups went some time in early 2017. Whoever finds them, please release them for the sake of us all.

If you’re not the lone voice, are there any public figures (I harp on this because it’s a different thing to say when you’re a person that relatively few people disrespect publicly) who have also expressed the idea that all public disrespect merits a response in some form? I believe I’ve uniformly seen the opposite…

I definitely agree with the point in general, but there are exceptions, as virtually all public figures have shown. They choose their battles with disrespect and attacks, choosing rightly to ignore those whom response only emboldens and legitimizes. I still haven’t seen any substantial support for why you’re right…

I definitely agree and there are analogous rules in other sports. You can get a flagrant for a clumsy, unintentional but dangerous challenge in the NBA, and you can get a red card for something similar in soccer.

Those are probably the strongest hands on a world class guitarist in history. Whether playing a 12-string acoustic or ludicrously heavy strings on an electric, he’s playing with more strength and control than nearly anyone else could on any instrument. If only this video didn’t have some doofus keep wandering onto the…

You seem desperate to use that as some sort of proof to say, “See, everyone does it!”

Again, there are well moderated spaces.

But are there any public figures that do the majority of their interaction with the public in open, actively moderated spaces? They all either operate in tightly controlled and choreographed situations or the wild, unmoderated world. In the former, there’s no avenue for disrespect to reach them. In the latter, there’s…

I completely agree with the gist of what you’re saying, and that’s why I still say ignoring it is not always mute acceptance. All of those celebrities and other public figures know that engaging with some of that disrespect on a superficial level (blocking and reporting in an ineffectual system) helps, but the world…

I can agree with all of that, but the original claim wasn’t about what’s good or what people want, but was about disrespect. If responding to disrespect (either with speech or the tools of active moderation) is necessary to avoid accepting it (your claim), why do virtually no public figures make even a cursory attempt…

I totally agree about the benefits of town halls and horrors of Twitter, but public figures, and increasingly politicians in particular, disagree, and they’re a lot more successful and respected than either of us. I’m actually having a hard time thinking of any public figure that interacts much with the public in the…

Since responding is apparently a strawman, what’s the mechanism for a politician to flag, ban, or delete disrespectful speech from a constituent, actively or otherwise? Twitter’s a good example of a (horrible) place with no moderation where lots of public figures operate. They can’t rely on active moderation, so are…

I’m impressed that you almost kind of responded, but then you retreated into your safe spots. Well-moderated forums are great, but the world isn’t a well-moderated forum. If you’re a joker messing around on some subreddit, yes, respond to everyone who disrespects you. The reality for real public figures is that they…

Dodge dodge dodge. You’re always content to nitpick about words and context from your post, yet you’re happy to pull a word out of context from my posts to summarily dismiss them. If you honestly believe that the text of this thread is so sacrosanct that it is worth being analyzed in the level of detail you go into,…

Flagging, banning, and other moderating works better.

So you still can’t come up with an example of a site that operates the way you say sites should, with active responses to bad posts instead of flagging and banning and deletion, but it was factually false and dumb for me to say that there aren’t any? I’m impressed you could so succinctly confirm that I was right and…